CHAPTER NINE
THE EXILES

So tremendous was America’s response when in the spring of this year the call came to her from the Western Front to hurry, so overwhelming the host which she sent over, that our chief difficulty to-day is not to withstand the Hun, but to find a vacant spot on his carcass to hit.

We have been in France for over a month now, but so far our services as a unit have not been required in the Line. But we are acclimatized by this time. The days of our green youth in the big camps back home have faded away as though they never had been. In this Old-World, constricted country it requires quite an effort of memory to recall those spacious days upon our own open, rolling plains and hillsides. Gone are the great streets of wooden two-storey huts, with their electric light, steam heat, and hot showers; the various social centres; the roaring Liberty Theatre and the Hostess House; the candy-stores and the shoe-shine parlours. They are but a memory, blurred by four months of incredibly novel experience.

To-day we sleep in French barracks—bleak, cheerless buildings, redolent of floor-soap and whitewash; or in billets up and down a little village; or in some great barn, on straw, or under the summer stars in our dog-tents. We perform our ablutions in the open air, mainly at a farm pump or street hydrant, to the diversion of the female population. For recreation we still play baseball; for creature comforts we can turn to the Red Cross, or the Y.M.C.A., or the Knights of Columbus, or the Salvation Army, or the Jewish Welfare Board. There is also a French institution, known as Le Foyer du Soldat, where we consort with grave-faced, courteous poilus. We have encountered no British troops so far. They are farther north: several of our units have gone up to be brigaded with them.

So here we are—right here in France—absorbing new atmosphere through our pores. We are on a strict war footing, too. Everything, as the Colonel has explained to us, must be “just so.” If you are ordered to be at a certain cross-road ten miles away, with your company, at 9 A.M. to-morrow morning, with picks and shovels and two days’ rations, you have to be there—just there—not at 9.05, with picks but no shovels, or with one day’s rations instead of two, but at 9 precisely, with the exact outfit prescribed. The accomplishment of this feat is not so easy as it sounds: it involves much study, and occasional weariness of the flesh. You must be able not only to read a map correctly, but to visualize from a scrutiny of the same the exact nature of the country through which you are going to lead your company—whether it is hilly or no; whether the hill runs up or down; whether there are grade crossings or narrow bridges or one-way roads to be considered; whether a ford marked “Passable for troops” is also passable for the wheeled transport which carries your picks and shovels. All these possibilities make for delay—sometimes most excusable delay. But excuses are not accepted in war-time. Either you succeed or you fail: there is no intermediate stage. Boone Cruttenden’s plan—and a very good one too—is to try experiments, not upon his men, but upon himself. In his spare moments he is accustomed to figure out, with the aid of the map and a mekometer, how long it would take a body of armed men to cover some given distance on the map, having regard to the possibility of—

(1) Unexpectedly heavy going.

(2) Roads blocked by other troops.

(3) Having to scatter or take cover, owing to enemy aeroplanes.

(4) The cussedness of transport mules.

(5) Other visitations of Providence.

He then enlists the services of a friend—usually Jim Nichols—and the pair proceed to test their own theories by performing the journey in person, at the pace of a marching company, correcting their calculations as they proceed. It is upon such painful foundations that your true soldier is built up.

And discipline is rigid. If the top sergeant instructs Mr. Joe McCarthy to empty certain buckets of kitchen garbage, and that right speedily, Joe no longer explains that he is here not to empty garbage, but to make the world safe for Democracy. He simply departs with the buckets, somewhat dazed at his own alacrity. War has her victories, no less than Peace.

Saluting is universal now. We take a pride in it. Formerly we did not. Our independent natures rebelled against its suggestion of servility. But we have recently realized that a slave is a man who bends his knee and bows his head. A soldier does neither. He holds himself erect, looks his brother in arms straight in the face, and exchanges with him the proudest of all masonic signs.

We are much interested in the saluting methods of our Allies. The Frenchman salutes with the open hand, palm forward and fingers pointing upward. The Britisher brings his elbow into play, and salutes with horizontal forearm. Both French and British officers salute in different fashion from their men.

The British practise strange refinements of their own. Bond, the stout medical Major whom last we met travelling in a railway compartment from Liverpool,—yes, we may as well divulge it; it was Liverpool,—was one of the first Americans to make a serious attempt to grapple with the fundamental laws of the subject. Almost immediately on arrival he was sent to Belgium, with other members of the craft, to render invaluable assistance at a British Casualty Clearing-Station not far from Ypres—that graveyard of British soldiers and German hopes. He observed with approval the punctilious, if complicated, fashion in which all ranks greeted one another in public places, and set himself to take notes and master the combination. Two months later, a prey to overstrain, he took a week’s leave in Paris, where he encountered that eccentric but companionable Anglo-American, Major Floyd.

They exchanged greetings and news. Floyd, it seemed, was now attached to the American Army, having been appointed a liaison officer. Then Bond said: “Floyd, I am glad I met you. You are one of the most lucid exponents of British institutions in captivity, and I want you to explain to me just half a dozen or so of the most common variations of the British military salute.”

Floyd nodded sympathetically.

“I know,” he said. “It seems complicated, but all you have to do is to get hold of the fundamental idea. Here it is. The one thing a British soldier must never do is to remove his cap.”

“Why?”

“If he takes it off, he is ‘improperly dressed’; and that practically disqualifies him from ‘getting on with the war’ for the time being. So he remains covered, indoors and out, except in church and during certain portions of the burial service. In fact, at moments of ceremonial intensity, such as the playing of the National Anthem, when civilians are reverently baring their heads, the soldier has to grab his cap and put it on quickly.”

“Otherwise he cannot come to the salute?”

“Cannot? Must not! It is a military crime to salute bareheaded. It says so in the book.”

“I see,” said Bond musingly. “That accounts for the fact that if I happened to meet a hospital orderly around the Casualty Clearing-Station without his cap, he never saluted me?”

“Precisely.”

“Then why—” Bond hesitated.

“I know your trouble,” said Floyd, fixing his melancholy gaze upon the Major’s puzzled face. “Instead of saluting you, he gave you a glare of withering contempt?”

“He certainly did. But how did you know?”

“Because that was what it looked like—to you. In reality the poor fellow was only doing what the Book says. He was turning his head ‘smartly towards the officer, while passing.’”

“That explains quite a lot. I was afraid it was I who was in wrong in some way, and he wanted to tell me so, but was prevented by the bonds of discipline from doing more than give me a good fierce look.”

“His proceeding was perfectly regular,” said Floyd gravely. “But that is not all. A British soldier is debarred from saluting not only when bareheaded, but whenever he is occupied in such a manner as to prevent him doing the thing in proper style. For instance, if you meet Tommy carrying a bucket or riding a bicycle, he merely gives his celebrated head-jerk, without employing his hand at all.”

“That is a good notion,” said Bond. “I shall adopt it. Last week I was riding a bicycle myself, and I nearly broke my collar-bone through letting go with one hand in order to salute a Brigadier-General in a muddy lane. Luckily I fell soft!”

“It’s a carefully thought-out system,” agreed Floyd, “and perfectly sound. Nearly everything in the British Drill Book is—so far as it goes. In nineteen fourteen that Drill Book put into the field the finest army that has ever fought under the British flag. Unfortunately very few of the nation had read it. When the War broke out there were still some forty millions of us who regarded it as a purely humorous publication. If they had listened to Lord Roberts and absorbed its gritty contents, instead of lapping up predigested pap from the politicians, perhaps there would have been no War. Anyway, some of my best friends would have been alive to-day. Those were the fellows, Bond! In the First Battle of Ypres three divisions of them, dead beat after eight weeks’ continuous fighting, stopped four fresh German Army Corps. The Drill Book taught them how to do that. They have mostly gone West now; but I for one will salute their memory so long as I live, cap or no cap!”

We are marching up the Loire now, getting nearer the front of things every day. Nantes is behind us—an ancient city astride the river, its historic quays crowded with American shipping and its wharves piled high with the products of those two mighty Allied bases, Chicago and Minneapolis.

The Loire is a pleasant stream. It is neither so broad as the Mississippi nor so deep as the Hudson, but it will serve. Shoals and sand-bars are frequent upon its surface, but on the opposite side the bank rises up to a quite respectable height, pleasantly reminiscent, at one or two points, of the Palisades.

And the towns we pass through are fascinating. For one thing, they come upon you suddenly. American towns absorb you gradually. First an outlying suburb, with maybe the terminus of the street-car system. Then an untidy No Man’s Land, neither cultivated nor inhabited—mainly vacant building lots—decorated along the route with huge advertisements, chiefly of automobile accessories. Here and there you pass a gasoline station or roadhouse. After that, by degrees, trim white wooden houses, with shady piazzas; increasing traffic; and finally, fifteen-storey office-buildings, shops, hotels, and the roar of the town.

But in Central France these premonitory symptoms are lacking. Your company tramps along the winding road beside the river, through country cultivated to its last yard—a country of hedges and ditches and enclosed fields. A bend in the stream, and lo! before you rises a venerable city, piled up on the ground rising from the river, with ancient bridges spanning the stream and a grey cathedral crowning the whole. There are no suburbs, no advertising boards, no gasoline stations. The sea of green turf continues to the edge of the city, and very often laps against ramparts a thousand years old. You march in under the resounding arch of an ancient gateway.

The streets are narrow; the gradient is frequently such as to discommode any one save a native of Lynchburg, Virginia. The shops are small, and the proprietors thereof appear to transact most of their business upon the doorstep. The inhabitants are friendly, especially the children. But most welcome sight of all, wherever we march, and through whatever town or village we pass, there are familiar greetings awaiting us, in the form of signs over doorways or at street-corners, thus—A.E.F. Commanding General’s Headquarters; or, To A.P.M.’s Office; or, American Red Cross Headquarters. And at each street-crossing, upright, sunburned, and immensely alert, stands an American Military Policeman, directing the tide of country carts, errant cows, antediluvian street-cars, despatch-riders, motor-cycles, and marching troops, with all the solemn austerity of a New York Traffic Cop.

If the American soldier has one characteristic which singles him out from the rest of the Allies, it is that Home is seldom absent from his thoughts—possibly because he is farther away from home than any one else. It is true that more water rolls between, say, France and Australia, than between France and America. But then to the Australian England itself is Home. In his own land he still refers to her as such. The true exile in this war is the American-born Doughboy. In most cases he has never been outside his own great and beautiful land before, for the simple reason that he has always found abundant elbow-room therein; and if the desire to roam has ever possessed him, he has been able to gratify it without stepping off the soil of his country or even beyond the border of his own State. Therein he is in different case from the inhabitants of those congested islets, Great Britain and Ireland, many of whose younger sons are thrust out in early life by the concomitant forces of natural increase and external pressure from the land of their birth to seek a living in distant portions of the globe—and in so doing have quite inadvertently created that unmethodical, loosely connected organization known as the British Empire, which is either a federation of free communities, providing decent government where otherwise there would be no government at all, or else a voracious octopus, according to the way you look at it.

But the American soldier, being for the most part familiar with no country but his own, adapts himself less happily to foreign conditions than Britons who have been schooled by stern necessity to make themselves equally comfortable in Wei-Hai-Wei or Wigan. Add to this the natural outspoken American affection for, and belief in, American institutions and mode of life, and you will understand why American troops on the march through Europe will cheer themselves hoarse at the sight of such reminders of Home as an American policeman directing the traffic in a French town, or an imported American locomotive puffing along a French railroad.

And there is one other American institution for which the American soul thirsts in this barren land—the American newspaper. Behold us billeted for a day or two in the little town of Crapaudville-sur-Loire. Existence there is a series of queues. In the morning we arise right early and make a careful toilet. For this purpose we form a queue, or water-line, at the town pump. This is not a lengthy business, because it does not take long to fill a pannikin with water: the only interruptions which occur are due to natural gallantry, as when an attractive Ally arrives to fill her family kettle. After that comes breakfast-time, which entails standing in another queue, or chow-line. After that as many of us as can contrive to do so hurry off to stand in the most important queue of the day—the news-line. A train from Paris, of arthritic tendencies and irregular habits, is due about noon, bearing newspapers, which are doled out at a price of twenty-five centimes.

There are, of course, sharp degrees of comparison. The great Paris morning journals are nothing in our young lives. They are written in a language which we do not know, and their headlines are lacking in enterprise. The Paris issue of the London Daily Mail is better. It reaches us in the form of a special American edition, which caters generously to our national predilection for type several inches high. But beyond that it does not go. Blossom and blossom and blossom, but never the promise of fruit! The reading matter below the headlines is constrained, lacking in pep—dead stuff. At least, so Joe McCarthy says. The Paris editions of the New York Herald and Chicago Tribune furnish more nourishment, although in these days of paper famine they are sadly attenuated affairs—mere single sheets, sometimes. Then there is our own A.E.F. weekly—The Stars and Stripes. It is ably conducted and full of meat; but at the best it is only an official publication, mainly about the War. And it was not printed in America. What we crave for is home news—home gossip—home advertisements. A single copy of an American Sunday newspaper, with comic supplement complete, would fetch its weight in dollar bills over here. Our spirits yearn to participate once more in the Bringing up of Father, or the fratricidal rivalries of Mutt and Jeff; or to witness the perennial discomfitures of those two intensely human impostors, Percy and Ferdy. Even those nasty little Boche abortions, the Katzenjammer Kids, would be something.

The happiest man is he who receives once in a while a copy of his local newspaper from home. These come rarely enough, for second-class mail matter is incurring mysterious casualties these days.

However, one of these priceless packages arrived not long ago for Eddie Gillette, all the way from a little town in the Northwest. Eddie tore off the wrapper, and almost set his teeth into the paper. Everything was there for which his soul hungered—news about America, about his own town, about people whom he knew personally—conveyed by means of the arresting headline, the pointed phrase, and the intellectual pemmican of the heavily leaded summary. The War news, of course, was weeks old, but Ed devoured it rapturously. He knew now how the War was really going.

“This guy Allenby must be some dandy fighter,” he observed to Al Thompson, looking up.

“Sure, Ed!” replied Al pleasantly. “Why?”

“He’s been doing fine in the Holy Land. See what it says here.”

Ed held up the newspaper for Al to see, and pointed to the head of a column:

BRITISH CRUSADERS IN NAZARETH

ALLENBY WINS JESUS CHRIST’S HOME TOWN FROM TURKS

“That’s the goods!” remarked Ed approvingly, as he folded the paper with reverent care and tucked it inside his shirt. “The feller that writes that stuff has gotten the real idea for a story. The others over here”—designating apparently the editors of the London Times and Paris Matin—“ain’t got nothing to them. No, sir! They don’t write nothing but small-town stuff!”

“You said it, Ed!” agreed Al.

“All the same,” observed the critic, rising and stretching his giant limbs, “this yer reading the papers from home may give a feller a grand and glorious feeling, but it makes him feel mighty lonesome and homesick too.” He raised a pair of great fists heavenward. “Oh, Boy! when I get back home after this War, if the Statue of Liberty ever wants to see Ed Gillette again, she’ll have to turn around to do it!”

CHAPTER TEN
S.O.S. TO DILLPICKLE

To most of us hitherto the letters S.O.S. have signified calamity of some kind—appeals for succour from sinking liners, and the like. Our British liaison officers, too, tell us that S.O.S. is the epithet applied to the rockets which are always kept in position in British front-line trenches, to be discharged as an urgent intimation to the gunners behind that the enemy are attacking in mass.

But in the American Army S.O.S. means “Service of Supply.” It denotes, not panic, but order, and control, and abundance. It covers the whole chainwork of activity known in most armies as the “Lines of Communication.” The town where we find ourselves to-day is a great S.O.S. centre. On its outskirts lie mushroom cities of huts and sheds. Here is a great cold-storage depot: there are eight thousand tons of frozen beef in this single building. Here is a big station for assembling aeroplanes, where de Haviland planes of British design are being fitted with Liberty engines. Through the town itself there flows by night and by day a never-failing stream of food and munitions and replacement troops. Needless to say the town lies upon one of the main roads along which the Race to Berlin is being run.

Back along that road, alas! streams another current—a counter-current—of wastage, material and human. Upon its surface is borne all the dreadful litter of the battlefield—rusty rifles, damaged equipment, blood-soaked uniforms. Here is a mighty depot, which handles and repairs such wreckage. These buildings have all been constructed within the past few months. It would take you half a day to walk through them. In at one end of the establishment goes a squalid torrent of torn clothing, unmated shoes, leaky rubber trench boots, odds and ends of equipment. In due course, after a drastic series of laundering, sorting, patching, stitching, or vulcanizing experiences—mainly at the hands of a twittering army corps of Frenchwomen—each item in this melancholy jumble finds itself reincarnated in various storehouses in the form of properly assorted pairs of boots and shoes, neat second-hand uniforms, and complete sets of equipment. Nothing is wasted. Stetson hats damaged beyond repair are cut up into soles for hospital slippers. Uniforms too badly ripped for decent renovation are patched, dyed grass-green, and issued to German prisoners.

There are some thousands of these prisoners, with more coming. When they arrive, their prevailing tint is grey. Their uniforms are grey, by nature; their knee-high boots are grey, with dust; their faces are grey, with exhaustion and grime. These human derelicts are submitted to very much the same process of restoration as the damaged uniforms and equipment. They are paraded, stripped, and marched into the first of a series of renovation chambers. They pass under hot showers; they spend a salutary period in what is delicately described as the “delousing chamber”; they are then provided, first with underwear, then with shoes, then with one of the grass-green uniforms aforesaid, and finally with a cooking and toilet outfit. They are shaved and their hair is cut; they are medically examined; they are card-indexed; a register is made of their trades; they are housed in comfortable wooden huts within a great barbed-wire enclosure; and within a few days they are at work upon whatever tasks they happen to be best qualified for, earning twenty centimes a day. They are fed upon the rations of American and British soldiers, including white bread—the only white bread in Europe.

Perhaps some of them, before they came here, saw the Allied prisoners in Germany—starved, robbed, beaten, and forced to work in salt-mines or shell-areas until death made an end of their afflictions. These languishing grass-green captives must bless the Geneva Convention, and marvel at the uncultured folk who still stand by its provisions.

A camp of German prisoners practically runs itself. Fritz knows when he is well off. There is no insubordination. Men come rigidly to attention when an officer passes. The routine work is supervised by German sergeants. In this particular camp you may enter one large hut and behold some fifty German prisoners engaged upon clerical work connected with camp administration—ration indents, card-indexes, and the like. It is a task after the German heart. Each prisoner is absorbed in his occupation. He can hardly bring himself to rise to his feet when the door is thrown open for the Officer of the Day, and Achtung! is called. His pig’s eyes gleam contentedly behind his spectacles. And well they may! A German delivered from the German Army and permitted to sit all day and make a card index of himself may be excused for imagining that he has got as near Heaven as a German is ever likely to get.

“When this War is over,” observes Mr. Joe McCarthy, gazing meditatively through the barbed wire, “I guess someb’dy will have to chase these ducks back to Germany with a gun!”

Frenchwomen are not the only representatives of their sex in the American Expeditionary Force. There are hundreds of American women too, from every walk of American life. There are the hospital nurses, the stenographers, the telephone operators, the motor-drivers—all duly enrolled members of the Regular Service. Then there are the women of the Auxiliary Forces—the Red Cross, and its sister organizations—all doing a man’s share, and something over. Their work is not supposed, of course, to take them up into the battle zone. They serve at the Base, or on Lines of Communication. But in these days of Big Berthas and promiscuous bombing raids, no one is safe. The battle zone is the extent of ground which an aeroplane can cover, as the inhabitants of London know to their cost. Some of the worst devastation in France may be witnessed at certain British hospital bases on the French coast, miles from any battle-line.

Still, women have been known to find their way into the Line. As some student of nature has told us, “It is hard to keep a squirrel off the ground.”

One summer morning an old acquaintance of ours, Miss Frances Lane, and her crony, or accomplice, Miss Helen Ryker, came off night duty at their hospital and sniffed the fresh air luxuriously. They had twelve hours of complete freedom from responsibility before them—a circumstance not in itself calculated to correct Miss Lane’s natural lightness of ballast.

In most hospitals nurses coming off night duty are not unreasonably expected to spend at least some portion of the following day in bed. But youthful vitality, abetted by summer sunshine and a martial atmosphere, make a formidable combination against the forces of common sense. This particular hospital was only thirty miles from the Line. On still days the turmoil of the guns could be heard quite plainly.

After breakfasting, Miss Lane took her friend by the elbow and led her to the great military map on the wall, with the position of the battle-line clearly defined upon it by an irregular frontier of red worsted, and said:

“Helen, listen! Just where are we on this little old map?”

Miss Ryker, who possessed the unusual feminine accomplishment of being able to read maps and railroad time-tables, laid a slender finger-tip upon the blue chalk-mark which designated the geographical position of the hospital.

“There,” she said.

“And,” pursued Miss Lane, in a low voice, “where do we go from here?”

Miss Ryker, who was a girl of few words, began to measure out distances with her finger and thumb.

“The nearest point to us,” she announced at last, “is a place called Delficelles.”

“Delficelles? Our boys captured it not long ago,” said Frances in confirmation. “I guess the trenches must lie just beyond.”

On one point she was right: Delficelles had been captured by an American Division a fortnight previously. On the other she was wrong, for a reason which will presently appear.

“We are going to visit them,” continued Miss Lane.

“How do we get there?” enquired her practical friend.

Miss Lane looked stealthily round, as a precaution against eavesdroppers. Then she smiled seraphically.

“I guess we can do it on our faces,” she remarked.

To get up into the Line—that tortured strip of territory, some five miles wide, which winds from the North Sea to the Alps, and within which two solid walls of men have faced one another for nearly four years—there are two recognized courses of procedure. One is to be a member of an armed party—an Infantry Battalion, say, going up to take over a sector of trenches. There is no doubting the bona fides of such an excursion.

The other course is incumbent upon solitary individuals like despatch-riders and unchaperoned civilians. These must have a much-signed and countersigned pass. Even Staff Officers are not exempt from this law. That lesson was learned as far back as nineteen fourteen, when German officers, arrayed in the uniform of the British General Staff, kindly accompanied the British Army during the retreat from Mons and added to the already considerable difficulties of a hectic situation by directing troops down wrong roads and issuing orders of a demoralizing nature.

So now it is almost as difficult for an unauthorized person to get into the fighting area as into the Royal Yacht Squadron, or the New York Subway at 6 P.M. Mesdames Lane and Ryker were obviously neither an armed party nor chaperoned civilians. But young and attractive females have means of attaining their ends which are denied to the rest of creation. Ask not how the feat was achieved. Enquire not the names of the susceptible lorry-drivers who succumbed, nor of the tall young military policeman at Dead Dog Corner who melted incontinently beneath the appeal of Miss Lane’s blue eyes. Let it suffice that by early afternoon our two runagates found themselves safely deposited in what was left of the village of Delficelles. (By the way, the local soldiery pronounced it “Dillpickle,” so we will let it go at that.)

Having reached the haven of their desire, they found, to their extreme satisfaction and relief, that it seemed to be no part of any one’s duty to turn them out. Indeed, such officers as they encountered punctiliously saluted their uniform, while the rank and file addressed friendly and appreciative greetings to them. One enthusiast produced a pocket camera, and insisted upon performing a ceremony which he described as “spoiling a film” upon the precious pair.

The village itself lay in a hollow behind a low ridge, and was in what may be described as moderate ruins. One learns to make these distinctions in the shell-area. Roughly, there are three grades. Villages whose roofs are riddled by shrapnel and whose windows have ceased to exist, but whose walls are still standing, may be regarded as practically intact, and are much sought after as places of residence. At the other end of the scale come the villages which were deliberately obliterated by Brother Boche during one of his great retreats. There are many such in the neighbourhood of Bapaume and Péronne. To-day not one stone of these remains upon another. Not a tree is to be seen. It is only by accepting the evidence of the map that you are able to realize that you are in a village at all. The main street runs between high banks, overgrown by weeds and nettles. If you part these and look underneath, you will find a subsoil of brick rubble.

At the cross-roads in the centre, where once the church stood, you will find a military sign-board giving the map-reference of the village, followed perhaps by a postscript, thus:

Fuit!

The village of Dillpickle occupied an intermediate position between these two extremes. Some of the houses were standing; others were merely a pile of disintegrated bricks and mortar. Where one of these ruins had overflowed into the street and obstructed the fairway, the débris had been cleared away and built up into a neat wall, guarding the sidewalk from further irruption. Such houses as still stood were inhabited, chiefly in the lower regions, by American artillerymen and the Infantry Brigade in reserve. The village was rich in German notice-boards—black stencilling on plain wood—announcing that here was the residence of the Kommandant, or here a shelter from bombardment for so many Männer, or that here it was Verboten for the common herd to go. Most of these were now pasted over with notices and orders in a different, and healthier, language.

Our friends collected a German notice-board apiece as a souvenir, and proceeded to ransack the village for further booty. Miss Ryker, who was domestically minded, gleaned two forks, a spoon, and some cups and saucers. Miss Lane, caring for none of these things, appropriated a small mirror. Presently she announced:

“I guess we’ll go up to the trenches now, Helen. They must be just over the hill, beyond that wood on the sky-line.”

But Miss Lane, as already noted, was wrong. The trenches did not lie just over the hill, for the very good reason that there were no trenches. We have grown so accustomed during this War to employing “trenches” as a synonym for “battle-line” that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is possible to fight upon the surface of the earth. For a long time both the Allies and the Hun suffered from a disease called “Trenchitis,” induced by an intensive experience of high explosive and machine-gun bullets. If a force wished to defend itself, it produced picks and shovels and dug itself in. If it wished to attack, it dug an advanced “jumping-off” trench in the dead of night, approached by saps and tunnels, and so made the open space to be covered in the assault as narrow as possible. This is a useful and economical way of fighting, especially when your troops are not sufficiently numerous to warrant prodigality. But it wastes much valuable time; and since the day when the entire American Nation was placed at the disposal of the Allies as a reinforcement, it has been found possible to employ other methods. Down South, on the Alsace-Lorraine front, where a lightly held outpost line runs for more than a hundred miles toward Belfort, trench warfare is still fashionable. But in the Argonne, where most of the fighting takes place in closely wooded country, we remain more or less above ground, maintaining touch with one another as best we can by means of an irregular chain of grass-pits or fortified shell-craters.

So when our pair of truants reached the wood on the sky-line, and penetrated cautiously to the other side, they beheld no trenches.

At their feet the road dropped steeply into a little valley, filled with woods which ran right up the slope beyond and disappeared into a smoky mist on the opposite crest. The sun had not fulfilled its early promise, and had disappeared by noon. A small drizzling rain was beginning to fall.

Helen Ryker, who loved her personal comforts, drew her blue cloak more closely round her, and shivered.

“They don’t have any trenches here,” she announced, in aggrieved tones.

“They are in the woods down in the valley,” Miss Lane assured her. “You can hear the firing.”

You certainly could. Up to their ears from the undergrowth on every side rose the mutterings of warfare—solitary rifle-shots, and the intermittent pup-pupping of machine guns. Down in the valley, at the foot of the road, they could see a stream. The road had once crossed it by a bridge; but the bridge was now a ruin, and the road had been diverted so as to cross higher up, by some sort of pontoon.

Not a human being was in sight. One of the strangest characteristics of modern warfare—warfare in which millions of men are employed where formerly hundreds sufficed—is the entire invisibility of the combatants. In these days of aeroplanes and magnifying periscopes no man ever makes himself more conspicuous than need be. A hundred years ago soldiers went into action in brightly coloured coats and flashing accoutrements. Now their uniforms imitate the colours of nature—the colours of grass and earth. Guns are painted to look like logs of wood. If a sniper wishes to do a little business from a tree-top or a thicket, he not infrequently paints himself green as a preliminary.

“It’s lonesome here!” continued Miss Ryker.

“I expect we shall find the boys presently,” replied the undefeated Frances. “My gracious, Helen, what was that?”

Over their heads—quite close, it seemed—sailed something invisible, with a weary sigh. It was a howitzer shell fired from an American battery five miles behind them. The sound of its passage ceased, but almost directly afterward a column of greenish-grey smoke spouted up from the wooded hillside opposite, followed a few seconds later by a heavy detonation.

Helen and Frances found themselves unaffectedly gripping hands.

“What is it?” asked Helen tremulously.

One of Miss Lane’s most compelling characteristics was that she was never at a loss for an answer.

“That? That’s artillery fire, I guess. That over there is the smoke of a big gun.”

As usual, she was partially correct. What they saw and heard was, indeed, artillery fire, but it was not the smoke of the gun, but the smoke of the shell bursting among the German machine-gun nests.

“German or American?” asked Helen.

“American, sure. Let’s go on down this road, and see some more. It’s a nice quiet road. There can’t be any danger.”

In the shell-area on the Western Front the fact that a road is quiet does not by any means guarantee that it is “nice.” But the people who really enjoy war are those who have not been there before. The pair of adventurers set boldly off down the hill. As they started, a second contribution from the howitzer battery passed over their heads, with the lazy rustle which characterizes the descent of high-angle shells, and burst in the woods opposite, fifty yards to the right of the first.

“There’s another gun firing!” exclaimed Miss Lane, clasping her hands rapturously. “My, but I’m excited! C’m along, Helen!”

They hurried down the road, observing with a pleasant thrill that the surface thereof was pitted with shell-holes. More experienced fire-eaters would have noted that some of these holes were of extremely recent origin—a few hours old, in fact. Once or twice they paused to collect more souvenirs—shell-fuses and empty cartridge-cases.

Distances viewed across a valley are deceptive, and their stroll down the road took longer than they expected. The rain was coming down harder than ever.

“We ought to hit those trenches soon,” said Miss Lane.

“What are trenches like, anyway?” enquired Miss Ryker, a little peevishly. She was beginning to make heavy weather of the expedition under her cargo of crockery and expended ammunition.

Miss Lane, whose acquaintance with trench warfare had been derived mainly from the Movies, made no reply. She had stopped by the roadside to read a notice-board, nailed to what was left of a tree. It said:

This road must NOT be used by troops during daylight.

She nodded her head sagely.

“That’s why there is no one around,” she remarked. “What were you saying just now, Helen?”

Miss Ryker had discovered a fresh grievance.

“It seems to me that some of the firing has gotten behind us!” she said.

The girls stood still, and listened. A third American shell swung over their heads and burst in the woods opposite. Simultaneously came a sharp outburst of machine-gun fire from the right—the right rear, in fact.

“Maybe we have walked into a sort of bend in the line,” suggested Frances. “They call it a salient,” she added professionally. “Why, if there aren’t some of our boys at last! There … crossing that bridge!”

She was right. As she spoke, two khaki-clad figures emerged from the woods upon the opposite side of the stream below them and trotted briskly across the pontoon bridge, in single file a few yards apart. Once across, they joined forces, and began to climb the hill in a more leisurely fashion. But it was noticeable that instead of coming up the road they kept a course roughly parallel to its direction—perhaps a hundred yards away.

“Why should they go hiking through that mushy long grass, wetting themselves, when there is a good road right here? Aren’t men just children?” observed Miss Ryker.

“Perhaps they don’t know about the road,” said Miss Lane charitably, “We’ll call them. Oh—Boys!”

Her syren call had the desired effect—as well it might. The gentlemen addressed, both of whom were labouring up the slippery slope with bent heads, stopped suddenly, and looked about them. Next moment they were doubling heavily through the long grass in the direction of the road, making signals as they ran. They appeared agitated about something.

“Come off that road!” shouted one of them, who was leading by ten yards, to the two female figures in the mist. “Quittez le chemin! C’est dangereux! Beat it for here! Dépêchez-vous! As hard as you—well—I’ll—be—” he swallowed something—“Frances Lane?”

With a final bound, Boone Cruttenden, with a steel helmet on his head, a gas apparatus slung on his chest, and acute fear in his eyes, landed squarely in the ditch; then scrambled out upon the road.

“Why—Boone?” began Frances affably. But, a grasp of iron fastened on her arm just above the elbow, and a badly frightened young man proceeded to propel her, without ceremony, across the ditch and away from the road.

“You fetch the other one, Major!” he called over his shoulder.

“I shall be charmed,” replied an unmistakable English drawl.

“Boone, listen!” protested Miss Lane breathlessly, as she was towed sideways across the hillside. “What are you—?”

But her escort merely muttered to himself, as they ran:

“Can you beat it? Can you beat it?”

Presently, having placed a distance of more than a hundred yards between itself and the road, the panting convoy was permitted to halt.

“We will now continue our excursion up the hill,” announced the English Major. “But we will keep off the road, if you ladies don’t object. It is registered from top to bottom, you know.”

“Just what does that mean?” enquired Miss Lane, whose natural curiosity was coming back with her breath.

“It means,” replied the Major, removing a shining monocle from his right eye and wiping it with a khaki handkerchief, “that the Boche has the range to every yard of it. As he usually searches it with H.E. and shrapnel every few hours, it is healthier to keep on the grass when going up and down this hill. Are we far enough away now, do you think, Cruttenden?”

“Ye-es. But it would be better to split into two parties, I should say. Less conspicuous—eh?”

The Major readjusted his monocle, and replied solemnly:

“By all means. This young lady and I will extend another hundred yards to the left. Cruttenden, considering your tender years, you display a promising acquaintance with tactics. Also diplomacy. So long!”

So by force of tactical exigency, Frances Lane and Boone Cruttenden walked up the hillside in the rain together. Major Floyd and Miss Ryker were discernible in the failing daylight, keeping station on the left flank.

“Now, tell me!” Boone and Frances began together. Then they stopped. Boone smiled.

“Ladies first!” he said.

But for once Frances preferred to be a listener.

“No, Boone Cruttenden—you!” she said. “Tell me what you are doing here, anyway.”

“I got a chance,” explained Boone, “to come here with Major Floyd—he’s our liaison officer with the British Mission back of the line—and have a look at this sector. The regiment may take it over next month. The Major knows the ground, and he took me down there”—he pointed backwards over his shoulder—“to see our advanced posts.”

“Where are the trenches?”

“Trenches? There are none. This is open warfare. The Yanks and the Huns are mixed up together in those woods, watching one another like cat and dog. We hold the stream, and some of the ground beyond. That pontoon bridge is covered by a concealed machine-gun post of ours, in case the Hun tries to rush it. It’s probable he had direct observation on it: that is why the Major and I did not linger much as we came across. We’re in a sort of pocket here. The German line bends around us. Some of their posts up in the woods have a clear view of the road, all the way up. Luckily visibility is bad to-day, or you might have been spotted. Now tell me what you are doing here!”

Frances told him—as much as she thought he need know.

“And where is your hospital located?” demanded Boone.

Miss Lane informed him.

“That is more than thirty miles back!” cried Boone.

“About that,” agreed Miss Lane meekly.

“Does any one know you are here?”

“I hope not! I mean, no one—except you, Boone,” replied Frances softly.

The conscientious Boone made a last effort to maintain a judicial attitude.

“Do you know you have committed a serious military offence?” he demanded fiercely. “Trying to get past sentries, and traffic police! Did you know that no women are allowed anywhere in the battle zone?”

“Yes,” said Miss Lane demurely. “That was why we came—to break a record!”

“And do you know that all this valley is liable to be searched with gas, and you have no gas-mask?”

“I didn’t know that,” confessed the delinquent, “but I might have guessed it, I suppose. But I was dead tired of that old hospital, Boone, and I was just crazy to see the fighting!”

“Crazy? That’s just the word. You crazy, crazy child!” said Boone affectionately. “Didn’t you know the chances you were taking?”

“Yes,” said Frances Lane. “But”—her eyes were raised to his for one devastating moment—“I knew I was safe the moment I saw you, Boone!”

“Oh, Francie!” murmured that utterly demoralized youth.

“And where are your headquarters located, Major?” enquired Miss Ryker brightly. The conversation had harped so far upon her own misdemeanours, and she was anxious to introduce a fresh topic.

“I live chiefly with the Division holding this sector,” replied Major Floyd. “I am liaison officer.”

“Don’t drop those cups. Just what does a liaison officer do?”

“I act as bell-hop between the local British Mission and the Americans. I go around paging Generals and Staff Officers—and everything,” replied the Major.

“There are no Generals here,” Miss Ryker pointed out.

“No. To-day I am having a vacation. Boone Cruttenden’s Division are in Corps Reserve near by, so I undertook to bring him up here and give him his first view of the Line.”

“How did you get here?” enquired Miss Ryker, who had not initiated the present conversation for nothing.

“On a Staff car.”

“An automobile?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Behind that wood at the top of the hill.”

“Then,” announced Miss Ryker, coming to the point, “you will be able to give us two poor girls a ride home.”

“It’s—it’s twenty-five miles out of our way,” said Floyd feebly. “Besides, Boone and I have our reputations to consider. He is young, and might live it down, but think of me! People would say I was old enough to know better.”

“Think of us!” countered Miss Ryker; “if we can’t get back, and the Matron finds that Frances and I have been playing hookey!” She followed up her appeal by a faint sob.

Major Floyd dropped the teacups and raised his hands above his head.

“Kamerad!” he groaned.

Whoo-oo-oo-oo-UMP!

A long overdue shell from a German field battery came shrieking over the tree-tops behind them and landed squarely in the road, two hundred yards to their right.

“You’re quite safe,” announced the Major, patting four fingers which he had suddenly discovered on the sleeve of his Burberry. “That one is too far away to hurt us. There will probably be more, but Fritz won’t shell away from the road. His imagination is not elastic.”

“What about Frances and Captain Cruttenden?” said Helen. “They are nearer the road than we are. Would that shell be able—?”

Major Floyd rubbed his misty monocle and examined the two figures to his right.

“They don’t appear to have heard it,” he announced, and shook his head mournfully.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LINE

Most of us in our extreme youth, before we leave home and adventure upon the Great Unknown of school life—the most formidable ordeal, by the way, that the majority of us ever have to face—endeavour to prepare ourselves for what we imagine lies before us by a course of study.

We devour stories about schools and schoolboys, with an application most unusual in the young. We have all the tenderfoot’s fear of being considered a tenderfoot, so we take pains to acquire the schoolboy tone; schoolboy atmosphere; schoolboy slang. The exploits of the hero after he becomes “Cock of the School”—whatever that may be—and leads the football team to victory, are dismissed by us as too lofty and distant for our achievement. We are much more interested—more painfully interested—in his experiences as a freshman or fag. We endeavour to pick up tips as to what a boy entering school for the first time should do, and more particularly what he should not do, in order to avoid being tossed in a blanket or sent to Coventry, or labelled “sissy,” or “cry-baby”—and all the other vague terrors which have kept prospective Cocks of the School awake at night since the dawn of Education.

This intensive course of self-preparation has one drawback. None of the things described in the books ever happen at the school to which we are ultimately sent. We have plenty of surprises, plenty of rough experiences; but none quite of the kind anticipated.

American soldiers, arriving on the Western Front in the fourth year of the War, feel themselves in very much the same position as the self-conscious adventurer described above.

Ever since—in some cases, before—our country came in, we have been schooling ourselves for the day when we should find ourselves Over Here, among veteran soldiers. Methods have varied, of course. Some of us have followed every turn of the operations in official summaries and technical articles. To such, the War has been a glorified game, we will say, of scientific football. Others—Miss Sissy Smithers, for instance—have educated themselves upon more popular lines—from the Sunday newspapers, or illustrated magazines of the domestic variety, in which healthy patriotism and “heart interest” are not fettered by any petty considerations of technical possibility.

Over here, Disillusionment awaits both these enthusiasts. The student of tactics soon realizes the difference between fighting a battle in imagination and in reality. Imagination cannot bring home to any human brain the extent to which the chess-board dispositions of modern strategy are tempered by the actualities of modern fighting—in other words, by the strain upon the human machine. All the five senses are affected—hearing, by the appalling din; seeing, by the spectacle of a whole group of human beings blown to shreds; smelling, by the reek of gas and explosives; touching, by the feel of dead men’s faces everywhere under your hand in the darkness; and tasting, by the unforgettable flavour of meat in the mouth after forty-eight hours’ continuous fighting in an atmosphere of human blood. The War is going to be won, not by the strategists, but by the man who can endure these things most steadfastly.

Miss Sissy Smithers need not be taken so seriously. He may be disappointed at first to find that Red Cross nurses follow their calling in Base Hospitals and not in No Man’s Land; and that performing dogs, loaded with secret despatches and medical comforts, are not such a prominent feature of modern warfare as the lady novelist would have us believe. But no enterprise, however grim, was ever the worse for a touch of glamour. Sissy will soon settle down.

Still, we have come to school knowing more than most new boys—far more, indeed, than our seasoned French and British companions knew when they embarked upon their martial education. The American soldier takes the field to-day, thanks to the recorded experiences of others, with a serviceable knowledge of the routine of trench warfare. Gas is no surprise to him, and he is familiar with the tactical handling of bombs, machine guns, and trench-mortars.

Up to date, however, we have not by any means drunk deep of warlike experience, for the good reason that the authorities are breaking us in by degrees. We are now in trenches, holding what is described as a quiet sector of the Line, recently taken over from the French, and hitherto very lightly held.

For the past two years, the Intelligence people tell us, the trenches opposite have been manned by only one German to every four yards of front. Eddie Gillette has already announced that when he has finished doing what he came out here to do the number of Germans opposite may be the same, but the method of distribution will be different. “Not one Dutchman to four yards,” he explains, “but a quarter of a Dutchman to every one yard. Yes, sir!”

Every Army has its own system of conducting trench warfare, founded largely upon national characteristics. The Germans, it used to be said, hold their trenches with machine guns, the British with men, the French with artillery. Certainly in nineteen-fifteen, when stationary warfare was the order of the day upon the Western Front, the Germans kept few men in the front trenches—except perhaps at night—leaving the line very much to the protection of barbed wire and machine guns, the latter laid and trained in such a fashion as to create if need be a continuous and impenetrable horizontal lattice-work of bullets in front of every section of the line. The British, having at that time more men than munitions—a battalion was lucky if it possessed four Vickers guns and a single trench-mortar—filled their trenches with as many defenders as they would hold, and trusted, not altogether vainly, to the old British tradition of rapid rifle fire and close work with the bayonet to keep the line intact.

The French temperament called for more elasticity than this. The one thing a Frenchman hates to do in warfare is keep still. He prefers active counter-measures to dogged resistance. So in nineteen-fifteen, whenever a sector of the French trenches was heavily bombarded, the garrison was promptly withdrawn to a position of comparative safety—where, the story goes, they seized the opportunity to cook an extra-elaborate dinner. If the Germans followed up their bombardment with an infantry attack, that attack was met mainly with an intensive barrage from that amazingly rapid and accurate piece of scrap-iron, the soixante-quinze field gun. When the German attack fizzled out, as it usually did, the incident ended, and the French infantry returned to their place in the line. But if it penetrated the barrage and occupied the French trenches, the Frenchman finished his coffee, adjusted Rosalie, his bayonet, and prized Brother Boche out of his new quarters.

But all that was in nineteen-fifteen. In warfare your best teacher is your opponent. Nowadays we have, on each side of No Man’s Land, assimilated one another’s methods. Moreover, trench warfare of to-day has developed into a fluid affair. For one thing, trench-mortars, tanks, and intensive artillery bombardments can make hay of the most elaborate defensive works. You can no longer surround yourself with barbed wire and go comfortably to bed, secure in the knowledge that your opponent cannot possibly get at you without a long and laborious artillery preparation. In nineteen-sixteen, before the First Battle of the Somme, British and French guns pounded the German trenches night and day for three weeks. It was a great pounding, but it cannot be said that the subsequent attack came as a surprise to the enemy. Under such prolonged and pointed attentions even a German is apt to suspect that something is in the wind. But to-day we have other methods. Three minutes of pandemonium from massed trench-mortars—a rush of tanks—and your defences are gone and the Philistine is upon you.

So in nineteen-eighteen we live perpetually upon the qui vive, and our methods have been elaborated and standardized to the common measure of our joint experience. Our artillery has the whole front registered. At a given signal it can let down a barrage—a Niagara of shrapnel and high-explosive—upon the strip of earth that separates the enemy’s front line from our own. This can be stationary, to annihilate an enemy attack, or “creeping,” to form a protective screen for an attack of our own. We have machine guns too, set, à la Boche, at fixed angles to maintain a continuous band of fire along each line of our trenches—more especially along the second line; for it is a waste of life and energy to-day to treat the front trench as anything more than a close chain of outposts, screening the real dispositions behind.

And the rifle and bayonet have come back to their own. Two years ago they were in danger of being discarded as obsolete. Every one was bomb mad. It was claimed that a rifle and bayonet are useless against an experienced opponent feeling his way along a zigzag trench in your direction. True; but a bomb is equally useless—or rather, equally dangerous—in the presence of an opponent rushing upon you in the open. So now we have adjusted our perspectives, and each device of war is put to its proper use.

So much for what the author of that little classic, “Dere Mable,” would describe as “Tecknickle stuff.”

Needless to say, we are burning to play with all these new toys simultaneously, like a small boy on Christmas morning. But we have had little opportunity so far. To vary the metaphor, we must eat up our bread and butter before we are allowed cake. We are busy at present learning trench routine. Taking over trenches from another unit, for instance. This is a complicated and exasperating pastime. It usually has to be performed in the dark; otherwise enemy aeroplanes might observe unusual activity behind our line, and advise their artillery to that effect. This involves much night-marching along roads pitted with shell-holes; and the trouble about a shell-hole three feet deep is that in wet weather it looks like a perfectly innocent puddle. Frequently, to avoid congested wheel traffic, we have to march across country in single file, under the leadership of a faltering guide. Not a light must be shown, not a word spoken. Each man, loaded with rifle, equipment, gas apparatus, and a few extra and unauthorized comforts, has to follow the ghostly form of the man immediately in front of him. It is discouraging work, for the simple reason that if you set one hundred men to march in single file in the dark, though the leader may be groping his way forward at the rate of one mile per hour, the last man in the queue is always running, and has to run if he is not to be left behind. No one knows why this should be so, but the uncanny fact remains.

Once you have descended into the communication trenches it is less easy to lose yourself—unless the guide sets the example—but your progress becomes slower than ever. Possibly—probably—you meet a procession going in the opposite direction—a ration-party, maybe, or stretcher-bearers with their patient, cheery freight. The fact that they have no right to be there at all—practically all communication-trenches here are supposed to be one-way thoroughfares—makes matters no easier, though it affords relief in the form of argumentative profanity as you struggle together in the constricted fairway like stout matrons loaded with market-produce in a street-car.

Arrived in the actual trenches, the congestion is even greater, for now there are just twice as many men in the trench as it was constructed to hold, and the outgoing party must never budge until the incoming party have arrived and “taken over.” Taking over is no mere formality either. Officers, machine-gunners, bombers, chemical experts, and other specialists must seek out their “opposite numbers” in the gross darkness and take receipt in due form of ammunition, observation-posts, gas-alarms, and situation reports, amid the crackling of rifle-fire and the sputtering of the illuminating flares.

At last the relief is complete. The word is passed along. The outgoing unit, after communicating sundry items of information as to the habits and customs—mostly unpleasant—of the local Boche, coupled with sundry warnings as to his favourite targets and own tender spots, fades away down the communication-trenches, with whispered expressions of good-will—and you are left alone, wondering what would happen if the enemy were to make a surprise attack now.

Trench life is never comfortable at any time, but the first night in a strange trench is the most uncomfortable of all. For one thing, the trench feels unnaturally crowded. Moreover, we are young troops—the youngest troops in the world to-day—and that means much. We have no Mulvaneys or Learoyds among us. If we had, we should be taught a number of things—how to boil a canteen over a couple of glowing chips; how to hollow out a bed in hard soil; where to find water in an apparently dry trench—trifles small in themselves, but making all the difference between misery and comfort.

But that by the way. With daylight comes a new spirit—or rather, the old spirit—of confidence. Eager persons peer over the parapet, to observe where the enemy is, and what he is like. They see little enough. Two hundred yards away an irregular ripple of sandbags—some white, some black—looking like a dirty wave-crest on a brown sea, marks the position of the German fire-trenches. This mixture of colours is thoughtful. If the sandbags were all of one tint, like our own, loopholes would be hard to conceal: under the German system, you never know at a distance whether you are looking at a loophole or merely a black sandbag. The intervening space is a wilderness of shell-holes, splintered tree-stumps, and rusty barbed wire. Further observation is cut short by a sniper’s bullet, which travels past enquiring heads with a vicious crack. We have learned our first lesson. In trench warfare, by daylight at least, curiosity must be satisfied through peepholes or periscopes.

In the trench itself there is plenty to occupy us. There are watches to be kept and manual work to be done. A trench system is eternally throwing out annexes and undergoing repairs, for the artillery on the other side is always busy. There are supplies to be brought up. There is cooking to be done: that occupies much time, for firing-trenches to-day are equipped, like the fashionable lady’s vanity-bag, with everything except the kitchen stove. And no bad thing either. Trench life has been described by competent authorities as “Weeks of Monotony tempered by Half-Hours of Hell.” Nothing dispels monotony like the necessity of practising the primitive domestic virtues. At home we hire expensive menials—or expect our wives—to light our fires and cook our dinners, because we are too busy or too civilized to do it ourselves. Over here we like doing it, because it is our actual instinct to do so, and also passes the time.

As for the Half-Hours of Hell, these mainly take the form of short, furious bombardments and midnight raids. But the German artillery is not very busy in this sector. Guns, and more guns, are urgently required farther north, where the Allied line, after stretching back and back during those anxious days in the spring of the year, has now reacted like a released bowstring and has shot the Boche back to the Meuse.

So far as we can gather from the sources at our disposal—official bulletins, intermittent newspapers, and trench gossip (personified in the American Expeditionary Force by a supposititious individual of great erudition but small reliability, whose Christian name is “Joe”)—our cause is prospering from the North Sea to the Alps. Germany shot her bolt with her third great offensive on the twenty-seventh of May, when German arms once more crossed the Marne and penetrated to within twenty-eight miles of Paris. There they were stayed, in a battle where at least one third of the Allied troops were American, and where the young American Army got its first real chance, and took it. In this operation the Second and Third American Divisions were sent to stiffen the French line. Of these, the Third successfully held a vital bridge-head opposite Château Thierry: the Second captured Bouresches, Belleau Wood, and Vaux.

So much we know for certain, for these things happened before we left England, and official information was available. The work of the Marines, in the Second Division, has already passed into American history. But for news of subsequent happenings we have had to depend too much upon our friend Joe. All we know for certain is that on the fifteenth of July the enemy launched just one more offensive—his fourth and as it proved, his very last. This time, so far as we can gather, the Allies, instead of contenting themselves with defensive tactics, took the business into their own hands and bit suddenly and deeply into the side of the huge, distended, pocketful of Germans which hung down from Soissons over Paris. The pocket promptly contracted itself: the enemy disgorged himself from its mouth, and began to retreat. From all accounts he has been retreating ever since.

French, British, and American troops were all engaged in this, the final and triumphant redressing of the balance. And each were represented by their best. One of our liaison officers tells us of a memorial set up by French soldiers in honour of the dead of the famous Fifty-first Division of the British Army—the Highland Territorials—and of an inscription carved thereon which proclaimed that hereafter the Thistle of Scotland would forever flourish beside the Lilies of France. In that great fight not merely unity of command, but unity of sentiment, seem to have come to their own at last.

The Allied counter-attack struck deep along the whole line. Soissons and Montdidier, we hear, are once more in our hands; while farther north, in Flanders, the British Third and Fourth Armies are sweeping forward for the last time in the blood-soaked valley of the Lys.